Who

The Witch's Yarn

I’m a huge fan of text adventures – the name “interactive fiction”, it seems
to me, is way too general, since it could cover any number of similar-but-
different media – but they are possibly the most unapproachable genre in the
world of computer games. There’s a lot of really interesting work being done
with the medium, but it’s pretty much impossible to get anyone who does not
already accept the strictures of the form to try them more than once. You can
always get someone to try them once. Inevitably, within less than a minute,
the new player will try to examine some item that is just part of the
“scenery,” or guess the wrong word, and they decide that this is stupid and
they don’t need to further subject themselves to the medium.

In one sense, that’s their loss. In metaphorical sense, though, the author of
the work just lost a reader because it wasn’t obvious how to turn the pages of
the book. Anyone who has ever watched a new player play a text adventure knows
exactly what I’m talking about.

>> Grab plate
I don't know how to grab.
>> Lift plate
I don't know how to lift.
>> get plate
I see no plate here.
>> get platter
I see no platter here
>> get dish
Which dish do you mean, the green plate, the blue
plate, or the red plate?
>> red
I don't know how to red.

Presumably, some authors choose the text adventure medium specifically because
they like its constraints, and want those pages to be hard to turn. For
those authors, the above scenario really isn’t their problem. Others, however,
may simply be trying to tell a story, and don’t care about the idiosyncrasies
of (say) the Inform parser. For these people, a different system might be
appropriate.

The Witch’s Yarn is, essentially, a “choose your own adventure” book, in the
form of a computerized stage play. It is available for both Windows and Mac.
Rather than controlling “a character,” the game is presented as a series of
scenes, with you as the ‘director’; you queue up characters, items, and
events, and then watch the drama unfold. Characters appear and disappear from
the stage, speak in text baloons, and otherwise expound on the plot (which I
won’t spoil here, but centers around a witch who is trying to interact with
the “mortal world” by openin a yarn store.) The wordsmithing is better than
you see in most adventure games – I’m including text IF here – but let’s be
frank, this is a videogame, not a Henry James novel. The main characters are
believable; the supporting cast is very caricature.

There have been other tools that let people develop “choose your own
adventure” style games, but the system used for The Witch’s Yarn seems
particularly polished, at least from the user’s point of view. Helpful prompts
explain how to let the story progress (without dictating a choice). The game
is always implicitly saved, so just quitting at any time will always allow you
to pick up where you left otf. If you make a mistake and steer the story to an
endpoint, the engine allows you to undo the previous choice, or roll back to
the beginning of a chapter. The graphics are simple; it looks like cues can
trigger simple animations. It’s unclear to me how much scripting the engine
allows. At least in The Witch’s Yarn the effect is that of being shown a
play performed by Colorforms stickers.

I’m being a little unfair when I describe the game as simply a choose-your-
own-adventure book. It’s a little more complicated than that. Rather, the cues
you introduce have an effect on the game state; the same cues introduced in a
different order can yield different results. So in the second chapter, for
example, the main character’s emotional state is bouncing around based on what
cues are introduced. Some cues (for example, an aggravating visitor) make her
angry. Some make her depressed. Some make her happier. Send in too many
“angry” cues in a row, and the story comes to an end. So at least in this
chapter, I started thinking of the protagonist not as an actor, but as my
little pet finite state automata, and I found myself trying to draw a mental
state diagram of all possible transitions.

This cueing system, actually, feels to me very much like what Emily Short did
in her artwork Galatea. The player conversed with a character in the game,
based on topics the player introduced, the game would take a different course.
In that work – which was text based – you basically had to guess-the-
trigger. In The Witch’s Yarn, the cues are all presented to you on a silver
platter. Other than that, the underlying concept is the same.

The engine that underlies The Witch’s Yarn is called CineProse. The press
release from the publisher, Mousechief, has an interesting paragraph that cuts
to the heart of the issue:

We believe that current adventure games do not address the constraints of
the casual game market. In our user testing, the majority of a sample
population was unable to perform basic control over the main character. That´s
why we re-invented the genre specifically for this market. Thus, the CineProse
style of adventure game was born. Subsequent testing of computer novices
showed that 100% of ages 8 to 78 were able to pick up and play The Witch´s
Yarn.

There are things one can quibble with, here. It’s arrogant to talk about “re-
inventing” the genre when multiple other publishers have “re-invented” the
same product, using the same mechanism, albeit not as slickly. And the people
who are producing adventure games for the people who already play adventure
games are not going to stop what they’re doing and start licensing CineProse:
the increased usability it provides is at the cost of eliminating whole
classes of user interaction that experienced players of the genre have come to
know and desire. But let’s zoom up to the 50,000 foot level and acknowledge:
they’re right. The casual game player finds the interface of the typical
adventure game bewildering.

The question, then, is how close to the bone can you strip an interface and
still be left with something that is fairly characterized as an “adventure
game.” That’s a bigger question, and not one i have an answer for.

The full version of The Witch’s Yarn is $20; I didn’t buy it. My calculus
went something like this: “Hey, this is a really neat story, and I’d kind of
like to know how it turns out. It seems like an interesting play. But it’s not
that much better than some of the IFComp games that came out this year. Those
are free. Also, $20 would get me a ticket to a community theater performance
of some other play that I haven’t seen. I don’t think I want to pay $20 to see
how this turns out; maybe if there was more game here I would, because then
there would be more of an intellectual challenge. I think this one is a no-go
for me.”

So it’s a conundrum. I estimate I would have spent about $10 to see how the
story ended. Any more than that, and you start asking yourself questions like
“Why don’t I buy a book, instead, which will be longer, probably better
written, and can be read away from my computer?” Despite the fact that I
wasn’t willing to shell out the lucre, I think that Mousechief has correctly
identified a need and has built what seems like a polished product to serve
it. The real question to me is: what will happen with CineProse? There’s a few
ways it could go. It could remain as Mousechief’s internal engine for their
adventure games, it could be licensed to other publishers for use in their
games as well, or it could be given away for free to all comers.

I’ve spoken briefly with the developer, Keith Nemitz, and he does indicate
that he intends to license the engine, and that there would be no fee for
noncommercial projects. This could be a very viable business model. I’ve
talked mostly about text adventures as being the alternative here, but graphic
adventures have their place as well, and as Ron Gilbert has described in
detail, the economics of producing them
are gruelling. If the CineProse bundle of Python scripts, SDL libraries, and
application software is basically marketed as “produce your adventure game at
a third of the cost of what your competitors are doing,” then Keith may do
very well indeed.

Giving away the tools for free to noncommercial projects seems like a smart
decision to me, particularly if Mousechief can figure out how to monetize it.
Off the top of my head, I’d imagine “give the dev tools away for free, but
require that the ‘player’ be purchased by the users to view the entire works”
might be workable. I’m really not going to pay $20 to read one potentially bad
short story. I might pay $40 to be able to read many, if I know for a fact
there are some good ones in the mix.

I feel bad saying that The Witch’s Yarn isn’t my cup of tea, because it’s an
attempt to look an entire genre in the eye and say “What you’re doing doesn’t
work for most users. We’re going to try something completely different.” I
respect that. So despite the fact that I didn’t buy it, I still think you
should visit their web site and download the
Windows or
Mac versions,
and try it for yourself. And let me know what you think.